LOSING MILITARY SUPREMACY LOSING MILITARY SUPREMACY THE MYOPIA OF AMERICAN STRATEGIC PLANNING Andrei Martyanov CLARITY PRESS, INC. © 2018 ANDREI MARTYANOV ISBN: 978-0-9986947-5-7 EBOOK: 978-0-9986947-6-4 In-house editor: Diana G. Collier Cover: R. Jordan P. Santos ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: Except for purposes of review, this book may not be copied, or stored in any information retrieval system, in whole or in part, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Martyanov, Andrei, 1963- author. Title: Losing military supremacy : the myopia of American strategic planning / by Andrei Martyanov. Description: Atlanta, GA : Clarity Press, Inc., [2018] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018016137 (print) | LCCN 2018024014 (ebook) | ISBN 9780998694764 () | ISBN 9780998694757 | ISBN 9780998694764 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States--Armed Forces. | United States-- Military policy. Classification: LCC UA23 (ebook) | LCC UA23 .M37 2018 (print) | DDC 355/.033273--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016137 Clarity Press, Inc. 2625 Piedmont Rd. NE, Suite 56 Atlanta, GA. 30324 http://www.claritypress.com TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction America’s Dangerous Narcissism / 7 Chapter One The True Measurements of Military Power / 15 Chapter Two The Birth of Modern American Military Mythology / 46 Chapter Three The Many Misinterpretations of World War II / 58 Chapter Four American Elites’ Inability to Grasp the Realities of War / 84 Chapter Five Educational Deficits and Cultural Caricatures / 100 Chapter Six Threat Inflation, Ideological Capture, and Doctrinal Policy Questions / 126 Chapter Seven The Failure to Come to Grips with the Modern Geopolitical Realignment / 150 Chapter Eight The “Hollow Force” Specter / 178 Conclusion The Threat of a Massive American Military Miscalculation / 193 Epilogue Putin’s Game-Changer: Peace Through Strength / 218 Endnotes / 226 Index / 246 America’s Dangerous Narcissism 7 | Introduction | AMERICA’S DANGEROUS NARCISSISM Alexis de Tocqueville’s widely renowned book, Democracy in America, addresses this aspect of the American character: All free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not displayed by all in the same manner. The Americans in their intercourse with strangers appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogium is acceptable to them; the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, whilst it demands everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the same time. If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, “Ay,” he replies, “There is not its fellow in the world.” If I applaud the freedom which its inhabitants enjoy, 8 | LOSING MILITARY SUPREMACY he answers, “Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it.” If I remark the purity of morals which distinguishes the United States, “I can imagine,” says he, “that a stranger, who has been struck by the corruption of all other nations, is astonished at the difference.” At length I leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he returns to the charge, and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all I had just been saying. It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it. 1 This observation from 1837 should have been a warning to the American political and intellectual elites long ago. Sadly, it has been ignored and has cost everyone dearly. The American vaingloriousness described by Tocqueville has today become a clear and present danger to the world and it is, in the end, a direct threat to what’s left of America’s democratic institutions and processes. It threatens a shaky republic and it is embedded in the very foundation of a now increasingly obvious American decline. Of course, there are many opinions about American decline on the public discussion stage—some opinions reject the whole idea of an American decline out of hand as propaganda; others go to the other extreme by proposing an imminent collapse and disintegration of the United States into several states. What is lost in this contentious debate is the troubling fact of the very real and very dangerous decline of American cognitive faculties, which is also accompanied by what Robert Reilly termed de- Hellenization2—a complete loss of sound reasoning across the whole spectrum of national activities from foreign policy, to economics, to war, to culture. This decline is more than visible, it is omnipresent in the everyday lives of many Americans and even affects people from other nations and continents. This decline has deeper roots than the mere change of some economic paradigm, albeit this too matters America’s Dangerous Narcissism 9 a great deal. It portends a total existential crisis of American national mythology—a crisis of the American soul that has nothing to do with the superficial, mass-media driven ideological or party affiliations—rather, it is the decline of a national consensus. This decline reflects the American failure to form a real nation, a process which, as paradoxical as it may sound, was prevented by a sequence of historic events in the 20th century, which turned the tables on American fortunes. As strange as it may sound, it was the continental warfare of WWII that the United States did not experience on its own soil, and the lack of experiencing any invasion by a peer foreign power, that failed to provide it with the historic glue, which was responsible to a large degree for the formation of modern nations. This may have played in favor of America’s post-WWII greatness, but it also bore the seeds of the American myth’s destruction with it. Those seeds, overlooked by a non-inquisitive American political and intellectual class in the 20th and 21st centuries, were pivotal in reinforcing stereotypes and clichés which, otherwise, they would have rejected as not having a solid grounding in real life. There is no denial that the United States and its people form a truly great nation. It is a powerful nation, a superpower with a short but bright history. American entrepreneurship and technological genius still continue to amaze the world. But there is a real downside to it; a real rot which becomes more evident with each passing day. It has happened before and if any historical parallels are to be drawn—a process which must be done in the most cautious and educated manner—one example of a dramatic change in historic fortunes comes to mind: the British Empire. English military historian Corelli Barnett, who experienced and documented Great Britain’s final departure from her superpowerdom, made one of the most relevant scholarly observations on the fundamental causes: … swift decline in British vigor at home and the failure to exploit the empire were not owing to some inevitable senescent process of history.... 10 | LOSING MILITARY SUPREMACY That cause was a political doctrine.... The doctrine was liberalism, which criticized and finally demolished the traditional conception of the nation-state as a collective organism, a community, and asserted instead the primacy of individual. According to liberal thinking a nation was no more than so many human atoms who happened to live under the same set of laws.... It was Adam Smith who formulated the doctrine of Free Trade, the keystone of liberalism, which was to exercise a long-live and baneful effect on British power.... Adam Smith attacked the traditional “mercantilist” belief that a nation should be generally self-supporting…3 Today, when one observes the catastrophic level of American deindustrialization, with the American heartland still not fully recovered from the financial crisis of 2008, or when one sees the current opioid crisis raging across American cities, or one counts the real number of people who are still unemployed, or are already unemployable, one is forced to recall the fate of America’s mother, the British Empire, on which the sun was never supposed to set and how this scenario, granted with some major adjustments, is being played out in a front of our eyes in the United States. But if the British departure from greatness was hidden within the momentous events of WWII, with the Suez Crisis being merely a legal conclusion to this drawn-out process, the American departure threatens to unleash a global thermonuclear war which may completely obliterate human civilization, and this is an outcome which must be prevented by all means. It is not easy when one considers the incompetence of the contemporary American political and intellectual classes, especially their complete obliviousness to the realities of war and the horrors it unleashes, as will be further addressed herein. It is here, in this obliviousness, where both American idealism and moralism most manifest themselves, here at this very juncture, that an America’s Dangerous Narcissism 11 exceptionally unique American hubris and a complete loss of a sense of scale and proportion in its self-aggrandizement, as well as loss of the sense of commensuration between effort and outcome, begin to dictate the logic of America’s view of itself. It is a disturbing vision, as the events of the last 20 or so years have proved. But as Orwell’s dictum goes, “Those who control the past control the future, and those who control the present control the past”. American “elites” proved themselves to be master manipulators of that vision. As a relatively recent 2015 poll showed, the West’s awareness of the realities of WWII is appalling, in fact, it is scandalous.4 It is doubtful that such a miscarriage of a historical justice will be challenged successfully in the combined West, let alone in the US itself, where many media figures, politicians and “scholars” are in overdrive, doing their utmost to falsify the actual truth about the birthplace of American, real and perceived, superpowerdom—World War II.